SEAN Bean breathes new life into the Frankenstein legend in a dark, tense detective drama inspired by Mary Shelley’s classic novel.

The morning of our chat with Sean Bean, a newspaper article is published. It’s a story about the odd relationship between the actor and on-screen death. As the article points out, the 56 year old has form when it comes to dying. Indeed, over the years he has snuffed it in every way imaginable, from decapitation to being crushed to death by a cow.

So the question as we gather on the set of his latest TV series – our setting is a dingy cellar in a bleak castle – is whether he will die in this one. And the immediate answer: inconclusive, but the scenario sounds promising.

I loved the old Frankenstein and Dracula films, the black and white ones with Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee

Sean Bean

The Frankenstein Chronicles, which began on ITV Encore last week, is a six-part period drama inspired by Mary Shelley’s classic novel. The year is 1827 and Sean plays a London policeman on the trail of a grisly crime.

A girl’s body has been found by the Thames, apparently stitched together from multiple body parts. What follows is a dark thriller involving bodysnatchers, potential serial killers and old-fashioned horror – which is what first drew him in, says Sean.

“I think the initial attraction was that I was really into watching horror films as a kid,” he explains, on a break from filming.

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Sean Bean and Tom Ward discuss a grisly discovery on the banks of the River Thames

“I loved the old Frankenstein and Dracula films, the black and white ones with Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee. So I guess I’ve always had some fascination with horror. And when they approached me about being involved in a version that was capturing the spirit of Frankenstein, I was very excited at the prospect.”

Unusually, the part also combines horror with classic detective work, albeit in a 19th-century setting. Sean’s character, John Marlott, is a copper in the days when policing was in its infancy.

“He’s ex-army at the time this is set.

A few years before, he was a soldier and fought at the Battle of Waterloo. And after the Napoleonic Wars, like a lot of men, he had to find alternative employment. So he became a river policeman in the early stages of the force at that time.

“Marlott lives alone. His wife and child died in tragic circumstances. And then he finds this child, and he’s employed by the Home Secretary Robert Peel [ex Silent Witness star Tom Ward] as an investigator on this horrific incident.

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Sean Bean in Game Of Thrones (2011)

“And that kind of focuses him. Up to that point he’s been a bit of a wanderer, a straggler. But he channels all his anxiety and restlessness into the case in order to find some kind of redemption in his life.”

In the best tradition of labyrinthine crime serials, anyone and everyone soon becomes a suspect, from “resurrectionists” – men employed by anatomists to exhume dead bodies – to experimental galvanists (galvanism being the attempt to revive corpses with electricity).

“When I first read it, I found myself pointing the finger all over. There are so many people who seem to be friendly and benign, but cover-ups are going on and there’s a lot of power in the mix. People are watching their backs.”

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The actor in The Lord Of The Rings (2001-03)

Interestingly, one of the suspects who appears later in the series is Mary Shelley herself, played here by The Bletchley Circle’s Anna Maxwell Martin.

“Our Mary is a bit weird,” hints Anna, 38, when we catch up for a chat later. “She’s pretty demented. Or maybe I just made her demented, I don’t know!

“Certainly the real Mary had a very dark time of it. She had a very tumultuous marriage to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. She lost three children. There was a lot of death and trauma. That’s what I have fed into the character, the idea that she was probably a very damaged, unhappy woman.

“Marlott seeks her out because he thinks there is some kind of connection between her book [published in 1818] and these dastardly crimes. He’s semi-suspicious of her and wants to know more about her background.”

As you might hope, 1820s London is recreated in all its dark, fog-infested glory in The Frankenstein Chronicles (although the show was actually shot entirely on location in Northern Ireland). The series was mainly filmed using natural light or naked flames, including thousands of candles shipped over from France.

One memorable sequence had him sharing screen time with one of his real-life pet hates – a swarm of rats.

“They released them down a tunnel. The idea was that the rats were coming down and you couldn’t really see them because it was dark. It was frightening!”